[Ygxejxox]

Joe Scarborough is an idiot.

[gugamotina]

Elucidate?

[AnneseeKels]

LOL

I left out the rest of the post, and hit the wrong Edit button.

Yesterday morning on his TV show, there was a discussion about Palin's rambling resignation speech.

Scarborough likes to project himself as a combination George Will-Will Rogers, but he ends up more like Roy Rogers.

He correctly observed that Palin should have scripted a simple statement, instead of recounting all her grievances; but not taking his own advice, he made an analogy.

Scarborough said that, as a prelude to the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration should have just made the case that the US has strategic interests in the Middle East and needs to be there. Well, it's true that the US needs to have some sort of presence (or influence); but even if, incredibly, the invasion still had popular support, does he think that candor would have resulted in less of a mess if the invasion still took place.

Unfortunately, no one at the table said anything, although there was a brief moment of awkward silence. Then back to Palin

Too bad Mika Brzezinski's father wasn't there. One time last year on the show, he called his daughter's co-host (or boss I guess, since it's Morning Joe) "incredibly naive"

Lots of by Mika.

[Biassasecumma]

I cant believe there is more than one Scarborough!

I kept thinking "Chuck" and picturing someone else entirely (can't remember the name... Cafferty! )

I think he was just trying to fit something into conversation that he REALLY wanted to talk about but it just did not fit. I have done that a few times.

This is just like the MJ funeral, you know??!?

[Misebeita]

[SzefciuCba]

NH: That's ^ your best post ever

What makes Sarah tick?

Palin: How she gained control and then lost it

Alaska Dispatch
Donald Craig Mitchell
July 9, 2009

... After watching the Friday news conference, Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson said that he thought Sarah "seemed more like a spoiled celebrity than a serious public official."

What Gerson got wrong is that Sarah is a spoiled celebrity. But it's not entirely her fault that she's spoiled. Because the media attention that has swirled around Alaska's governor-girl for the past ten months has altered the brain chemistry of a narcissistic personality that somewhere way back along the line was damaged decades previous.

An Australian friend of mine has theorized that Sarah's odd behavior suggests that she has been afflicted since childhood with Reactive Attachment Disorder, a rare psychological condition that is described in volume four of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Disorders. Many of the symptoms do seem to fit: superficially engaging and charming, lacks cause and effect thinking, inappropriately demanding, engages in lying, lacks a conscience, has poor impulse control, has abnormal speech patterns, etc. But I am not a psychiatrist. So I don't know if that's Sarah's problem.

What I do know is that in 2002 when she began her statewide political career, Sarah Palin already was a legend in her own mind whose it's-all-about-me sense of entitlement already was pathological. I'm no psychiatrist either, but I know a nut job when I see one.

But that doesn't mean that she's out of the game, or that our fellow citizens -- celebrity lovers to the last drop -- will reject her.

[Alulursuifold]

The Woman from Wasilla: The gift that keeps on giving ...

Sarah Palin Book Contest Winner!

The Mudflats
July 11, 2009

And now…the moment you’ve all been waiting for! Flyinureye presents
the Gold Medal winner in the Mudflats’ Sarah Palin Book Naming Contest!
Sarah - Vain and Simple.
Would we have ever imagined that we’d be enjoying this book cover
in her fleeting last 3 weeks of lameduckitude?

Or would that be lameduckery? Ah, well. If the book jacket fits…

[Amerworma]

OP-ED COLUMNIST
She Broke the G.O.P. and Now She Owns It



By FRANK RICH
Published: July 11, 2009

SARAH PALIN and Al Sharpton don’t ordinarily have much in common, but they achieved a rare harmonic convergence at Michael Jackson’s memorial service. When Sharpton told the singer’s children it was their daddy’s adversaries, not their daddy, who were “strange,” he was channeling the pugnacious argument the Alaska governor had made the week before. There was nothing strange about her decision to quit in midterm, Palin told America. What’s strange — or “insane,” in her lingo — are the critics who dare question her erratic behavior on the national stage.

Sharpton’s bashing of Jackson’s naysayers received the biggest ovation of the entire show. Palin’s combative resignation soliloquy, though much mocked by prognosticators of all political persuasions, has an equally vociferous and more powerful constituency. In the aftermath of her decision to drop out and cash in, Palin’s standing in the G.O.P. actually rose in the USA Today/Gallup poll. No less than 71 percent of Republicans said they would vote for her for president. That overwhelming majority isn’t just the “base” of the Republican Party that liberals and conservatives alike tend to ghettoize as a rump backwater minority. It is the party, or pretty much what remains of it in the Barack Obama era.

That’s why Palin won’t go gently into the good night, much as some Republicans in Washington might wish. She is not just the party’s biggest star and most charismatic television performer; she is its only star and charismatic performer. Most important, she stands for a genuine movement: a dwindling white nonurban America that is aflame with grievances and awash in self-pity as the country hurtles into the 21st century and leaves it behind. Palin gives this movement a major party brand and political plausibility that its open-throated media auxiliary, exemplified by Glenn Beck, cannot. She loves the spotlight, can raise millions of dollars and has no discernible reason to go fishing now except for self-promotional photo ops.

The essence of Palinism is emotional, not ideological. Yes, she is of the religious right, even if she winks literally and figuratively at her own daughter’s flagrant disregard of abstinence and marriage. But family-values politics, now more devalued than the dollar by the philandering of ostentatiously Christian Republican politicians, can only take her so far. The real wave she’s riding is a loud, resonant surge of resentment and victimization that’s larger than issues like abortion and gay civil rights.

That resentment is in part about race, of course. When Palin referred to Alaska as “a microcosm of America” during the 2008 campaign, it was in defiance of the statistical reality that her state’s tiny black and Hispanic populations are unrepresentative of her nation. She stood for the “real America,” she insisted, and the identity of the unreal America didn’t have to be stated explicitly for audiences to catch her drift. Her convention speech’s signature line was a deftly coded putdown of her presumably shiftless big-city opponent: “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.” (Funny how this wisdom has been forgotten by her supporters now that she has abandoned her own actual responsibilities in public office.)

The latest flashpoint for this kind of animus is the near-certain elevation to the Supreme Court of Sonia Sotomayor, whose Senate confirmation hearings arrive this week. Prominent Palinists were fast to demean Sotomayor as a dim-witted affirmative-action baby. Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard, the Palinist hymnal, labeled Sotomayor “not the smartest” and suggested that Princeton awards academic honors on a curve. Karl Rove said, “I’m not really certain how intellectually strong she would be.” Those maligning the long and accomplished career of an Ivy League-educated judge do believe in affirmative-action — but only for white people like Palin, whom they boosted for vice president despite her minimal achievements and knowledge of policy, the written word or even geography.

The politics of resentment are impervious to facts. Palinists regard their star as an icon of working-class America even though the Palins’ combined reported income ($211,000) puts them in the top 3.6 percent of American households. They see her as a champion of conservative fiscal principles even though she said yes to the Bridge to Nowhere and presided over a state that ranks No.1 in federal pork.

Nowhere is the power of resentment to trump reason more flagrantly illustrated than in the incessant complaint by Palin and her troops that she is victimized by a double standard in the “mainstream media.” In truth, the commentators at ABC, NBC and CNN — often the same ones who judged Michelle Obama a drag on her husband — all tried to outdo each other in praise for Palin when she emerged at the Republican convention 10 months ago. Even now, the so-called mainstream media can grade Palin on a curve: at MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” last week, Palin’s self-proclaimed representation of the “real America” was accepted as a given, as if white rural America actually still was the nation’s baseline.

The Palinists’ bogus beefs about double standards reached farcical proportions at Fox News on the sleepy pre-Fourth Friday afternoon when word of her abdication hit the East. The fill-in anchor demanded that his token Democratic stooge name another female politician who had suffered such “disgraceful attacks” as Palin. When the obvious answer arrived — Hillary Clinton — the Fox host angrily protested that Clinton had never been attacked in “a sexual way” or “about her children.”

Americans have short memories, but it’s hardly ancient history that conservative magazines portrayed Hillary Clinton as both a dominatrix cracking a whip and a broomstick-riding witch. Or that Rush Limbaugh held up a picture of Chelsea Clinton on television to identify the “White House dog.” Or that Palin’s running mate, John McCain, told a sexual joke linking Hillary and Chelsea and Janet Reno. Yet the same conservative commentariat that vilified both Clintons 24/7 now whines that Palin is receiving “the kind of mauling” that the media “always reserve for conservative Republicans.” So said The Wall Street Journal editorial page last week. You’d never guess that The Journal had published six innuendo-laden books on real and imagined Clinton scandals, or that the Clintons had been a leading target of both Letterman and Leno monologues, not to mention many liberal editorial pages (including that of The Times), for much of a decade.

Those Republicans who have not drunk the Palin Kool-Aid are apocalyptic for good reason. She could well be their last presidential candidate standing. Such would-be competitors as Mark Sanford, John Ensign and Newt Gingrich are too carnally compromised for the un-Clinton party. Mike Huckabee is Palin-lite. Tim Pawlenty, Bobby Jindal — really? That leaves the charisma-challenged Mitt Romney, precisely the kind of card-carrying Ivy League elitist Palinists loathe, no matter how hard he tries to cosmetically alter his history as a socially liberal fat-cat banker. Palin would crush him like a bug. She has the Teflon-coated stature among Republicans that Romney can only fantasize about.

Were Palin actually to secure the 2012 nomination, the result would be a fiasco for the G.O.P. akin to Goldwater 1964, as the most relentless conservative Palin critic, David Frum, has predicted. Or would it? No one thought Richard Nixon — a far less personable commodity than Palin — would come back either after his sour-grapes “last press conference” of 1962. But Democratic divisions and failures gave him his opportunity in 1968. With unemployment approaching 10 percent and a seemingly bottomless war in Afghanistan, you never know, as Palin likes to say, what doors might open.

It’s more likely that she will never get anywhere near the White House, and not just because of her own limitations. The Palinist “real America” is demographically doomed to keep shrinking. But the emotion it represents is disproportionately powerful for its numbers. It’s an anger that Palin enjoyed stoking during her “palling around with terrorists” crusade against Obama on the campaign trail. It’s an anger that’s curdled into self-martyrdom since Inauguration Day.

Its voice can be found in the postings at a Web site maintained by the fans of Mark Levin, the Obama hater who is, at this writing, the No.2 best-selling hardcover nonfiction writer in America. (Glenn Beck is No.1 in paperback nonfiction.) Politico surveyed them last week. “Bottomline, do you know of any way we can remove these idiots before this country goes down the crapper?” wrote one Levin fan. “I WILL HELP!!! Should I buy a gun?” Another called for a new American revolution, promising “there will be blood.”

These are the cries of a constituency that feels disenfranchised — by the powerful and the well-educated who gamed the housing bubble, by a news media it keeps being told is hateful, by the immigrants who have taken some of their jobs, by the African-American who has ended a white monopoly on the White House. Palin is their born avatar. She puts a happy, sexy face on ugly emotions, and she can solidify her followers’ hold on a G.O.P. that has no leaders with the guts or alternative vision to stand up to them or to her.

For a week now, critics in both parties have had a blast railing at Palin. It’s good sport. But just as the media muttering about those unseemly “controversies” rallied the fans of the King of Pop, so are Palin’s political obituaries likely to jump-start her lucrative afterlife.

Link

[PRengine]

Out of Alaska

Sarah Palin on why she resigned and what it means for her future.
by Matthew Continetti
The Weekly Standard
07/20/2009, Volume 014, Issue 41

In early July, while most Americans were preparing for a long weekend of celebratory parades, charred meats, and noisy fireworks, Sarah Palin made some plans of her own. The Alaska governor had been the object of endless media attention and assorted calumnies since she became John McCain's vice presidential nominee last August. Now she wanted to try something new. So, on July 3, in a speech delivered from her home on Lake Lucille in Wasilla, Palin told her constituents that not only would she not seek a second term, but she would also be transferring authority to Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell on July 26, abdicating her office with about 18 months left to go. The announcement, as one might expect, received global press coverage, dominated the weekend headlines, and gave stories about the late Michael Jackson a run for their money. Meantime, the political world went into sustained convulsions.

The fierce reaction surprised Palin. She is acutely aware of what the media and her opponents say about her. She heard some people say that the timing of her speech was odd. Not so. "Independence Day is so significant to me--it's sort of a way for me to illustrate that I want freedom for Alaskans to progress, and for me personally," she told me during a telephone interview on July 9. Others said the motivation for her resignation was not clear. "I'm like, 'Holy Jeez, I spoke for 20 minutes' " giving reasons, she said. Bloggers conjectured that a horrible scandal was looming over her. Nope. Palin says she even heard a rumor that she resigned because pornographic pictures of her were about to hit the Internet. This left her bemused. "Between which pregnancies did I get to pose for those?" she said sarcastically. The obstinacy of her enemies, the fact that they consistently attribute bad-faith to her and accuse her of double-speaking, continues to mystify her. Hearing all the innuendo, Palin said to herself, "Really? You can't just believe what I'm saying?"

One thing you quickly learn about Sarah Palin when you study her career is that she never, ever does things by the book. The lady knows how to make a splash. She specializes in surprise announcements. Her 2004 resignation from the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, her 2005 declaration that she was challenging incumbent Frank Murkowski for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, her March 2008 revelation that she was seven months pregnant with her fifth child, then her August 2008 addition to the GOP presidential ticket and the subsequent shocker that her 17-year-old daughter was pregnant: All galvanized public opinion and upset established patterns of doing business.

Palin likes gambles. Her career is filled with firsts. In 2006, Palin became the first woman governor in Alaska history (as well as the youngest). In 2008, she became the first woman to appear on a GOP presidential ballot. And on July 3, she probably became the first governor with a 54-percent approval rating to resign from office for reasons having nothing to do with scandal or appointment to another job.

Palin says she had been thinking about her decision for a while, and had talked to various people about it. In January, during her state of the state address to the Alaska legislature, she asked lawmakers to put the previous year's election behind them. "I asked them not to allow those distractions that were on the periphery to hamper the state's progress," Palin told me. But her plea went unheeded. "It became obvious in the last months especially that too many people weren't going to ignore those things on the periphery," she said. As the months passed, Palin arrived at the conclusion that she didn't want a second term as Alaska's governor. She had achieved what she had set out to do, so why bother with one more lame-duck legislative session in 2010? "I know that we've accomplished more in our two years in office than most governors could hope to accomplish in two terms," Palin said. "And that's because I hired the right people." For Palin to remain shuttling between Juneau, Anchorage, and Wasilla would waste both her and her constituents' time. And "I cannot waste time," she said. "I cannot waste resources."

Before the announcement, Palin gave no public sign that she was thinking of resigning. When I visited Alaska in May, I heard widespread speculation that the governor would not run for reelection, but no one mentioned the possibility that she would resign. That announcement, Palin's sometime pollster David Dittman told me last week, was "out of the blue." Alaska's next governor, Sean Parnell, reportedly found out that he was getting a promotion only a few days prior to Palin's announcement. The Alaska GOP chairman, Randy Ruedrich, who has clashed with Palin in the past, also expressed surprise. When I asked another plugged-in Alaska Republican for comment on Palin's decision, the response was, "Where do I begin?"

Palin's unconventionality and authenticity is the key to her appeal. She may move contrariwise to elite opinion in Washington and New York, but doing so strengthens her bond with conservative Republicans across the country. The things that make liberals flip-out at the first mention of Palin are exactly the ones that rally conservatives to her side. Liberals view Palin's resignation as a sign of weakness. Conservatives view it as attractive nonconformity. "To her credit," Dittman said, "she just didn't tip off a few people and go through the motions for a year and a half."

Why is Palin leaving? At this writing, there is no reason to doubt her stated position: Her enemies' concerted efforts to tear her down have caused her family financial stress and distracted her from her duties as governor. Since she returned to Alaska in November 2008, she has been hemmed in. Ethics complaints, insults, invective, undue attention, and legal bills have been all-consuming. "I can't fight for what's right when I'm shackled to the governor's seat," Palin said. For the last seven months the governor's office has been a ward. A trap. She is breaking free.

Palin likes to say "everything changed" for her on August 29, 2008, the day she was introduced as John McCain's running mate. That may be an understatement. Before then, Palin was an extremely popular governor known to Alaskans as a bipartisan reformer and a champion of clean government. Outside Alaska, she was almost completely unknown. When she strode onstage with McCain that August day in Dayton, Ohio, the only thing the global media knew for sure about Palin was that she opposed abortion and recently had given birth to a child with Down's syndrome. Since then, Democrats and the press have done everything in their power to transform this populist hero into a gun-toting, idiotic, apocalyptic harpy.

Last year, in the space of eight weeks, the media said Palin was a Buchananite (she wasn't), a member of the Alaska Independence Party (nope), a book-banner (wrong again), and a biblical literalist who believed dinosaurs roamed the Earth several thousand years ago (an utter fabrication). When it wasn't mangling facts, the press did its best to undermine Palin's accomplishments, from selling Governor Murkowski's jet to finally pulling the plug on the Bridge to Nowhere to pushing through a natural gas pipeline with bipartisan support. The denizens of leftwing fever swamps accused Palin of infidelity and questioned her most recent pregnancy. Feminist activists denied Palin her womanhood because she did not share their politics. Comedians made fun of her accent, clothes, smarts, and good looks. And in a craven attempt to preserve their ties to the media, the campaign operatives who had promoted Palin to John McCain later turned on her, telling reporters (on background, of course) that Palin was an incompetent "rogue" "diva" who may have been suffering from postpartum depression.

Palin-hatred is visceral and unrelenting. "Our state was inundated with opposition researchers trying to dig up dirt, the Democratic blogosphere up here making stuff up," Palin told me. The file on my desktop labeled "Insult List" is an attempt to track every foul thing that's been said about Sarah Palin since she rose to national prominence. At the moment, the list is seven single-spaced pages long. Palin's been called, among other things, a "bimbo," a "cancer," a "farce," a "jack in the box," a "provincial," a "maniac," an "airhead," "Lady Gaga," and "political slime." And that's just a small taste of the G-rated stuff. The blue material is far worse.

Unable or unwilling to grasp her true accomplishments and character, the media shoehorned Palin into a ready-made caricature of the know-nothing Christian PTA mom who enters politics because of "those damned lib'ruls." The reality is far different. Palin is a savvy and charismatic politician whose career has been filled with courageous stands against entrenched authority. Ideological or partisan attachments do not concern her. She has her flaws--who doesn't?--but they should be measured against her strengths. Instead the media ignored the positives and colluded with Palin's adversaries to reduce her to a cartoon.

The attacks did not stop when McCain and Palin lost the election. To the contrary: They shifted location and emphasis. Palin returned to a changed Alaska. Her first year in office had been remarkably successful because she governed with an ad hoc legislative coalition of Democrats and antiestablishment Republicans. That coalition broke down the moment Palin became a force in national politics and the most famous woman (probably the most famous person) in the Republican party. The Democrats in the legislature defected en masse. Compounding the problem: Because she had unseated it, the GOP establishment never liked Palin and wanted her to go away.

Suddenly "people were confronted with policy differences with the governor," Alaska state senator and Palin ally Gene Therriault told me. "The call went out from the national Democratic party to take her down. Some of the Democrats who worked with her previously took their marching orders." Gridlock ensued. Bipartisan comity was no more.

Anybody who had the opportunity to score political points against Palin took a shot. The Alaska judicial council, a body that recommends jurists to the governor, forced the pro-life Palin to appoint a pro-choice judge to the state supreme court. The legislature rejected Palin's choice for state attorney general. The governor and the legislature fought protracted battles over the replacement for Democratic state senator Kim Elton (appointed to the Obama administration) and stimulus money from the federal government. Civility with the legislature became untenable. John Coale, the Washington, D.C.-based Democratic lawyer who set up Palin's political action committee and legal defense fund, told me, "Something had to change."

The problem wasn't so much Palin as it was Alaska. She had become too big for her home state. Bizarrely, her celebrity did not expand her political capital but erased it. The knives were out, and you could hear the sound of still more sharpening in the distance.

The moment warranted a bold move. John Bitney, a former Palin aide who has known the governor since they were in junior high, told me that in times like these Palin seeks spiritual and familial counsel. "Sarah Palin on a personal level is driven by spiritual guidance that has taken her to where she is today," he wrote in an email exchange last week.

Bitney, whom Palin let go over personal differences in 2007, is worth quoting at length. "While she has learned to accept that guidance--she often alludes to it in her statements--she probably can't explain it fully," Bitney wrote. "And I am assuming that guidance is now apparently telling her it's time to heal herself, her family, and get grounded for whatever the future holds. I can tell you that I have learned to respect her guidance (wherever it comes from), for it has given her strength and direction to some unparalleled political heights."

Alaska ties down Palin in multiple ways. The state's distance from the rest of America makes it difficult to travel to major cities (or small caucus and primary states) in the continental United States without a hefty time commitment and scheduling effort. So far this year, every time Palin traveled outside Alaska, her enemies inside the state pilloried her for neglecting her job. This is a standard that applied neither to George W. Bush, who traveled the country campaigning for president while he was still Texas governor, nor to Barack Obama, who spent two of his four years as a U.S. senator from Illinois running for president. Palin chafes at this inconsistency and still isn't used to the idea that a different standard applies to her.

Then there are the ethics complaints. Practically everything Palin has done since returning home has been politicized by her enemies and, in some cases, criminalized. The moment she knew there would be trouble, Palin said, was when she returned to the governor's office in Juneau after the November election. The gaggle of reporters assembled there asked her a few questions about the campaign. Palin answered them. Almost immediately, an ethics charge was filed against her for conducting political business from her state office. "That was part of the Democratic plan to grind her up," state senator Therriault said. "Use the ethics law as a blunt instrument to club the administration."

In her July 3 speech, Palin mentioned 15 ethics complaints leveled against her. The Anchorage Daily News counts 18. The Wall Street Journal reports that Palin's office has been inundated with 150 FOIA requests for information regarding her schedule and contacts. Her staff is spending its time as unwilling participants in a giant fishing expedition. "They knew how to file these," Palin said. "They knew what category to file them under. We got the fake people, we got the people filing online."

The charges are frivolous. Some are just silly. One complaint said Palin violated the law by mentioning her vice presidential candidacy on her state website. Another said that her wearing a T-shirt with the insignia of Todd Palin's sponsor in the Iron Dog snow-machine race constituted a conflict of interest. "It's a cold, outdoor event," Palin said. "I've been wearing Arctic Cat gear for many years. I wear a Carhartt coat and commercial fishing bibs, too." Yet another complaint was filed under the name of a character from a British soap opera. One suspected it was only a matter of time before someone complained on behalf of the turkey who was decapitated in the background as Palin gave a television interview last Thanksgiving.

The state personnel board has dismissed the complaints, one after the other. According to the governor, however, when all is said and done--when one factors in all the wasted time and resources--the cost to Alaska amounts to some $2 million. "Why would I continue to put Alaskans through that?" Palin said. Furthermore, because state ethics law requires the accused to pay for her own defense, the Palins' personal legal bills add up to around $500,000. The Palins aren't poor, but they aren't rich, either. Paying off the debt will take some effort. If Palin remained in office until the end of her term, the bills would just grow.

Some of the charges were so silly that Palin wanted to pay the fines and move on. "I got to the point where I said, 'May I just plead guilty?' " she told me. But pleading guilty would have been political suicide. Palin's opponents in the legislature would have moved to impeach her on the flimsiest of pretexts. She had to fight it out, whether or not it was costing her money and peace of mind. "In politics you're either eating well or sleeping well," Palin said. "I want to be able to sleep well."

The accusations affected Palin emotionally. A rare and necessary talent for a great politician is the capacity to ignore or laugh off the critics' most vicious assaults. FDR had it. So did Reagan. When Palin spoke at the 2008 Republican convention, it seemed as though she had it, too. Her commanding performance gave the impression that the previous week's falsehoods, exaggerations, myths, insults, and smears did not matter to her. Not one bit.

This doesn't seem to be the case anymore, however. Over time, the attacks on Palin--on her character, intellect, appearance, femininity, and family--clearly got to her. One associate told me that, after the election, Palin made a habit of listening to talk radio, attempting to track what pundits were saying about her. Her Momma Grizzly instincts came out whenever her sons and daughters were mentioned. In January, she gave a rare interview to the libertarian documentary filmmaker John Ziegler on media bias. She could hardly give a speech in which she did not mention elite condescension and her ill-treatment at the hands of Katie Couric and leftwing bloggers. Her public performances became personal testimonials to the damage the media can inflict on a person's reputation and career. Palin was right, of course. But these were arguments for polemicists to make, not statesmen.

Palin thought she could respond to every attack. But no one can respond to every attack. Nor should they. Hatred and slander aimed at the people who disagree with you is a lamentable yet unremarkable fact of American politics. The vitriol is the heap of dirty laundry in the corner of a room that everybody pretends to ignore. A politician just has to live with the smell.

Palin is not a normal politician, however. For one thing, she is a newcomer to the national arena. The bulk of her career has been at the local and state level, where the stakes and the tempers are low compared with the rock 'em, sock 'em dramas that play out inside the Beltway and on the cable channels and blogs. "Everyone else in '08 had been in the game for decades," John Coale said. "They all had been there. This was somebody playing for the first time." For Palin, the hostility directed at her was novel and shocking. Because she prides herself on her unconventionality, and because she knows how to win a political knife-fight, she decided to fight back.

The turning point came in June. On June 3, Palin introduced the conservative radio talk-show host Michael Reagan at a dinner in Anchorage. In her introduction, Palin clumsily paraphrased from articles by Newt Gingrich and author Craig Shirley. Palin attributed the statements to Gingrich and Shirley, but she was a little sloppy in doing so. Predictably, a leftwing blogger soon took to the Huffington Post--a virtual coffee klatch for Palin-haters--claiming that the governor was guilty of plagiarism.

The charge did not go unanswered. Palin's lawyer issued a statement saying that the blogger's accusation was ridiculous, which it was, especially considering that both the current president and vice president are known to have lifted passages from other politicians in the past without any attribution whatsoever. Both Gingrich and Shirley said no plagiarism had occurred. The round went to Palin.

Next, on June 8, the late-night comedian David Letterman made a partisan, crude, and unfunny joke involving baseball star Alex Rodriguez and Palin's underage daughter Willow. The former had "knocked up" the latter, Letterman said, on the Palins' recent trip to New York City. (In his monologue, Letterman also said Palin had a "slutty flight-attendant look.") Palin didn't watch the show, but the next day a reporter asked for her reaction. When the reporter read the joke to her, Palin was taken aback. She called it disgusting. What happened next shocked her even more. "The reaction to my candid and heartfelt response blew me away," Palin said. "I all of a sudden became the bad guy. Who says I don't have the right to give a candid and heartfelt response? The reaction to it really opened my eyes: This is ridiculous. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't."

Palin demanded that Letterman apologize. She defended her position on the airwaves. Less than a week later, Letterman said the nasty crack actually had been directed at Palin's 18-year-old daughter Bristol, as though that made it any less tasteless. Then Letterman admitted he'd been wrong to make the joke in the first place. Palin had won again.

In late June, an Alaska Democratic blogger pasted the face of a pro-Palin radio talk-show host on the body of Palin's son Trig. The governor's camp released a withering statement, saying, "The mere idea of someone doctoring the photo of a special needs baby is appalling. To learn that two Alaskans did it is absolutely sickening. .  .  . Babies and children are off limits." The blogger backtracked. She said she only had intended to ridicule the talk show host, like that made any difference. "What if I hadn't responded?" Palin said. "Well, then, the criticism would be, can't you stand up for the special needs community?" The constant bickering and shifting standards rankled her. "Well, enough is enough," she said. "I would like the opportunity to speak up and speak out."

Palin's new combativeness is pronounced. When she announced her resignation, the Internet rumor mill went into high gear. Lefty bloggers could not countenance the idea that the woman to whom they devote such enmity might actually be resigning for her stated reasons alone. There must be some other story, they wrote, some other snowshoe waiting to drop. The CNN anchor Rick Sanchez speculated on air that Palin might be pregnant. The Alaska blogger Shannyn Moore wrote on the Huffington Post that Palin resigned because she was "under federal investigation" for self-dealing in the construction of a recreation center in Wasilla. Other liberal bloggers parroted Moore's baseless accusations. Palin's team wasted no time in issuing a statement from the governor's lawyer that shot down Moore's blog. "We will be exploring legal options this week to address such defamation," the lawyer wrote. The FBI also came out and said Palin was not the subject of an investigation. Another malicious story batted down.

Palin had made a clear decision to defend her family's honor. "The toll on her family from all the events over the past three years has been extraordinary," John Bitney wrote in his email to me. "She had a baby, Bristol had a baby, Track was sent overseas, and no doubt Piper and Willow have all the day-to-day issues that come from young women growing up." The parade of outrages against her and her children didn't help.

Yet a politician's job is to serve her constituents, not bicker with comedians. Palin has been caught in a bind. Her global celebrity has been in tension with her duties to Alaska. Had she remained in office, the tension would have become more pronounced. Meanwhile, the agenda on which she defeated Frank Murkowski has been enacted into law. One more year in office would mean additional legal bills and constant juggling between the demands of family, work, and fame. The job had become demanding and unpleasant.

So Palin let go.

Palin has begun ramping up her criticism of President Obama. "Somebody's got to start asking President Obama questions" about how he plans to pay for his agenda, Palin said. In her July 3 speech, she blasted "debt-ridden stimulus dollars," said that "today's Big Government spending" is "immoral and doesn't even make economic sense," and called the national debt "obscene." In an interview last week with Time magazine, she called cap-and-trade "cap-and-tax," and said the policy would "drive the cost of consumer goods and cost of energy so extremely high that our nation is going to start exporting even more jobs to China." I asked Palin about President Obama's response to the democratic upheaval in Iran. "Maybe they're tougher behind closed doors," she said. She noted that there were plenty of things "the most powerful man in the world" could do to help bring down Ahmadinejad, including a new round of international sanctions. She went after Obama's rhetoric. "It's not 'meddling' in another country's business when you understand that what happens over there affects us over here," she said. "I wish Obama was tougher in that area."

Speculation about Sarah Palin's presidential ambitions is premature. She herself probably does not know her next move. There is a strong chance that the unpredictable Palin may decide against running for any office, ever. You never know. But since the presidency so captivates Americans, and since the most recent vice presidential nominee has as much of a claim on the next presidential nomination as anyone, "Palin for President" (Tippecanoe and Piper too!) stories will be around for years to come.

Did Palin's surprise resignation help her chances? The flippant answer is, "Check back in four years, bub." The serious answer is, "There's no strong consensus one way or the other." When Palin announced her resignation, the conventional wisdom immediately gelled behind the position that she could no longer win the GOP presidential nomination in 2012. Maybe. Slowly and haltingly, however, an alternative theory emerged that said the move might not damage Palin as much as the establishment believed it would.

The polling evidence seems to confirm this. So far, Palin's fans have viewed her decision not to seek reelection sympathetically. A Gallup poll released on July 8 recorded that 67 percent of Republicans wanted Palin to have a role as a national political figure. A Rasmussen poll from last week found that Mitt Romney, Palin, and Mike Huckabee are in a statistical tie for the nomination.

Palin has a devoted following. No Republican politician energizes GOP crowds as much as she does. When I saw her speak at the Vanderburgh County Right to Life dinner in Evansville, Indiana, in April, Palin was practically mobbed by well-wishers and autograph seekers. The conservative movement is rudderless, and social conservatives in particular would like a powerful spokesman for their cause. The social issues may not have played much of a role during Palin's governorship, but once she is free from office she can emphasize them as much as she likes.

One lesson from Barack Obama's candidacy is that a politician should seize his (or her) moment. Elite opinion, remember, thought that Barack Obama wasn't ready to run for president in 2008. He should sit back, the argument went. Gain seasoning. Master a few issues. Wait for his turn. But Obama understood that when you do that, you end up being Joe Biden. Obama understood that once the spotlight is on you, it's foolish to let it pass on to someone else. He ignored the naysayers. He launched his campaign. Now he lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Reagan's late campaign manager John Sears had a term to describe what voters look for in a presidential candidate. The term was "appropriateness." Sears meant that John Q. Public wants to support the guy that best fits his mental picture of what a president should be. Does Palin have such "appropriateness"? The verdict is mixed. Certainly there's a latent hunger for a viable female presidential candidate who isn't Hillary Clinton. Palin, moreover, looked authentic and commanding in her speech to the 2008 Republican National Convention. It is not an exaggeration to say that her address there was one of the most effective political communications ever. In the vice presidential debate, Palin went toe-to-toe with Biden, the paradigmatic Beltway insider, and gave as good as--if not better than--she got.

Throughout her career, Palin has seemed most "appropriate" at moments when she senses that the populace is diverging from the political class that rules over it. Palin exploits the split and wins office as the tribune of the people. That is what happened when she saw that Wasillans were tired of the nonideological, nonpartisan, unexciting mayoralty of John Stein; when she saw self-dealing among Republican insiders in Anchorage and Juneau; when she saw that Alaskans were tired of Frank Murkowski and the lobbyist culture he nursed and protected. That is what she and John McCain tried to do last year, when Americans had grown tired of George W. Bush and Republican misrule (things didn't work out the way they'd hoped). The next time Palin sees a gap separating the people and their government, she may try to jump in and fill it.

For now, though, Palin will focus on writing her book, on the midterm elections, and on giving speeches. One certainty is that neither she nor the people who love and hate her are going away. "It's not retreat," Palin said. "It's moving more aggressively than ever to fight for what's right." Today the Palinistas and Palinphobes are as much a part of the national scene as they have been part of Alaska's. Since her debut, Palin has sparked curiosity and revulsion, devotion and illwill, admiration and scorn in equal measure. For whatever reason, the press cannot take its unblinking eye off of her. To the media and her detractors, she is a force of nature. She cannot be ignored.

The obsession is sure to intensify. Be prepared. Hurricane Sarah is about to descend on the Lower 48.


Matthew Continetti is the associate editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD. His The Persecution of Sarah Palin will be published by Penguin Sentinel in 2010.

Link

[Dreqsqse]

Yeah, yeah, yeah ^

But wait until she has to start answering tough policy questions.

Bye, bye ... Sarah done gone fishin'.

[drycleden]

I miss the good old days, when it was just the plain ordinary "liberal media."

Now that core Republicans are becoming more isolated, it's the "mainstream media."

[immewaycypef]

Lol!

[Janarealiti]

"Et tu, WSJ?"

JULY 11, 2009

A Farewell to Harms

Palin was bad for the Republicans—and the republic.

By PEGGY NOONAN

Sarah Palin's resignation gives Republicans a new opportunity to see her plain—to review the bidding, see her strengths, acknowledge her limits, and let go of her drama. It is an opportunity they should take. They mean to rebuild a great party. They need to do it on solid ground.
[Declarations] AP

Her history does not need to be rehearsed at any length. Ten months ago she was embraced with friendliness by her party. The left and the media immediately overplayed their hand, with attacks on her children. The party rallied round, as a party should. She went on the trail a sensation but demonstrated in the ensuing months that she was not ready to go national and in fact never would be. She was hungry, loved politics, had charm and energy, loved walking onto the stage, waving and doing the stump speech. All good. But she was not thoughtful. She was a gifted retail politician who displayed the disadvantages of being born into a point of view (in her case a form of conservatism; elsewhere and in other circumstances, it could have been a form of liberalism) and swallowing it whole: She never learned how the other sides think, or why.

In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn't say what she read because she didn't read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. "I'm not wired that way," "I'm not a quitter," "I'm standing up for our values." I'm, I'm, I'm.

In another age it might not have been terrible, but here and now it was actually rather horrifying.

McCain-Palin lost. Mrs. Palin has now stepped down, but she continues to poll high among some members of the Republican base, some of whom have taken to telling themselves Palin myths.
More Peggy Noonan

To wit, "I love her because she's so working-class." This is a favorite of some party intellectuals. She is not working class, never was, and even she, avid claimer of advantage that she is, never claimed to be and just lets others say it. Her father was a teacher and school track coach, her mother the school secretary. They were middle-class figures of respect, stability and local status. I think intellectuals call her working-class because they see the makeup, the hair, the heels and the sleds and think they're working class "tropes." Because, you know, that's what they teach in "Ways of the Working Class" at Yale and Dartmouth.

What she is, is a seemingly very nice middle-class girl with ambition, appetite and no sense of personal limits.

"She's not Ivy League, that's why her rise has been thwarted! She represented the democratic ideal that you don't have to go to Harvard or Brown to prosper, and her fall represents a failure of egalitarianism." This comes from intellectuals too. They need to be told something. Ronald Reagan went to Eureka College. Richard Nixon went to Whittier College, Joe Biden to the University of Delaware. Sarah Palin graduated in the end from the University of Idaho, a school that happily notes on its Web site that it's included in U.S. News & World Report's top national schools survey. They need to be told, too, that the first Republican president was named "Abe," and he went to Princeton and got a Fulbright. Oh wait, he was an impoverished backwoods autodidact!

America doesn't need Sarah Palin to prove it was, and is, a nation of unprecedented fluidity. Her rise and seeming fall do nothing to prove or refute this.

"The elites hate her." The elites made her. It was the elites of the party, the McCain campaign and the conservative media that picked her and pushed her. The base barely knew who she was. It was the elites, from party operatives to public intellectuals, who advanced her and attacked those who said she lacked heft. She is a complete elite confection. She might as well have been a bonbon.

"She makes the Republican Party look inclusive." She makes the party look stupid, a party of the easily manipulated.

"She shows our ingenuous interest in all classes." She shows your cynicism.

"Now she can prepare herself for higher office by studying up, reading in, boning up on the issues." Mrs. Palin's supporters have been ordering her to spend the next two years reflecting and pondering. But she is a ponder-free zone. She can memorize the names of the presidents of Pakistan, but she is not going to be able to know how to think about Pakistan. Why do her supporters not see this? Maybe they think "not thoughtful" is a working-class trope!

"The media did her in." Her lack of any appropriate modesty did her in. Actually, it's arguable that membership in the self-esteem generation harmed her. For 30 years the self-esteem movement told the young they're perfect in every way. It's yielding something new in history: an entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy.

"Turning to others means the media won!" No, it means they lose. What the mainstream media wants is not to kill her but to keep her story going forever. She hurts, as they say, the Republican brand, with her mess and her rhetorical jabberwocky and her careless causing of division. Really, she is the most careless sower of discord since George W. Bush, who fractured the party and the movement that made him. Why wouldn't the media want to keep that going?

Here's why all this matters. The world is a dangerous place. It has never been more so, or more complicated, more straining of the reasoning powers of those with actual genius and true judgment. This is a time for conservative leaders who know how to think.

Here are a few examples of what we may face in the next 10 years: a profound and prolonged American crash, with the admission of bankruptcy and the spread of deep social unrest; one or more American cities getting hit with weapons of mass destruction from an unknown source; faint glimmers of actual secessionist movements as Americans for various reasons and in various areas decide the burdens and assumptions of the federal government are no longer attractive or legitimate.

The era we face, that is soon upon us, will require a great deal from our leaders. They had better be sturdy. They will have to be gifted. There will be many who cannot, and should not, make the cut. Now is the time to look for those who can. And so the Republican Party should get serious, as serious as the age, because that is what a grown-up, responsible party—a party that deserves to lead—would do.

It's not a time to be frivolous, or to feel the temptation of resentment, or the temptation of thinking next year will be more or less like last year, and the assumptions of our childhoods will more or less reign in our future. It won't be that way.

We are going to need the best.

Copyright ©2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

[bloriMal]

Clear evidence ^ that the overly-educated Peggy Noonan just doesn't get it that a vast majority of those in the USA (1) have a miserable level of education, (2) have a lack of knowledge or understanding of the people & world beyond our borders, (3) would rather go shopping (because that's all many really know how to do), (4) love celebrity above all else, and (5) hold a strong resentment and dislike for many others who seem to be smarter than them.

Given that, the fish loving Mrs. Palin just might do better in the future than lovers of The Republic might hope for.

[kjanyeaz1]

An article written last autumn, on how Palin came to be.

http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/sh...&postcount=353

[UrUROFlS]

She is a complete elite confection. She might as well have been a bonbon. Best line in the article.

[astonmartinrx371]

Palin was not the problem. McCain was the problem...an outright HORRIBLE candidate for the Republican Party, or any party for that matter. President Bush destroyed the GOP, but McCain kicked the old dog on the ground, almost for sport. I am thankful to live in Arizona, now, so I can vote against Mr. McCain when he comes up for reelection. That guy turns my stomach.

[corriffuniee]

Good riddens to bad rubbish!! May she NEVER resurface in politics again! Let's PAAAARTY!!!

[Kliopeion]

McCain lost it in 2000. After Bush Jr whipped him in the primaries he lost all his chutzpah.

He was great when he was on teh daily show trying to keep a strait face when asked about GOP policies that he did not agree with. A real strait shooter.

Somewhere along the line he lost that, and became a yes-man.

As for saying "It isn't Palin's fault".....what?

You mean her own inability to lead was not her fault? He own shortcomings ARE her fault! He ACCEPTING the nomination to be VP WAS HER FAULT!!!! If she was FORCED to do it (Do this or your kid will die!!!!! Palin: Which one?), then maybe, but no. She got too greedy and was WAY out of her league.

The thing thatbugged me yesterday was seeing teh cover of, I think Time magazene with "Renegade" printed above her picture.

Renegade????? What, she joined a biker gang and is now riding across the nation like in Easy Rider?

Not.

I seriously hope she fades into anonymity, along with the rest of her family, until they find out exactly who did what with that whole athletic facility (and anything else that may have slipped under the rug).

[WapSaibian]

Once Mrs. Palin is out of office -- and she no longer has the clout that comes with such a position -- it will be interesting to see how she is covered in the news.

Of course, if she is given the treatment of most former office holders (obscurity) she then will most likely claim mistreatment by the MSM and declare it is evidence of bias against a fish swimming against the tide.